the border here look deceptively empty. The Jordanian soldiers peering north across no man’s land see only dusty ghost towns where nothing moves except feral dogs and an occasional farmer working fields that have seen too little rain and too much war.
Yet, despite extraordinary efforts to stem the tide, billions of Captagon pills from dozens of manufacturing centers continue to pour across Syria’s borders and through its seaports. The trade’s ripple effects are expanding ever outward, to include rising levels of addiction in wealthy Persian Gulf countries and the appearance of drugmaking labs in neighboring Iraq and as far away as Germany, according to Iraqi and German officials.
“This is the stream of revenue on which they are relying in the face of sanctions pressure from us and from the European Union,” said Joel Rayburn, the U.S. special envoy to Syria from 2018 to 2021. “The Assad regime could not withstand robust sanctions enforcement, except for Captagon. There is no other source of revenue that could make up for what they lost due to sanctions enforcement.”
“The most profound point is that sanctions strengthen the bad actor relative to the rest of the population,” said Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser for the Obama administration who worked on Syria policy in the early years of the civil war. “The people who are most able to withstand this are the people with guns and power.”
Among his collaborators, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials said, were operatives with the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah as well top Syrian political and military leaders —“The most profound point is that sanctions strengthen the bad actor relative to the rest of the population. The people who are most able to withstand this are the people with guns and power.”Two Biden administration officials, citing U.S.
While it’s not technically accurate to call Syria a narco-state — Captagon is a stimulant, not a narcotic — the country has become so dependent on drug income that Assad would be hard-pressed to shut down the drug factories if he decided to, said Caroline Rose, a researcher who oversees the“They’ve taken Captagon to such a level that the industry can sustain itself,” Rose said. “It’s no longer mobile facilities, but permanent factories that can accommodate industrial-scale production.